The Rolling Stones:Can't Get No Satisfaction

The night a friend in California called and told me about Altamont, I
was having dinner with a woman I'd met a week before--just when the
crowd at the speedway was beginning to gather, in fact. We had sat in
my apartment and listened to Let It Bleed, and as Mick Jagger
sang out the climax of "Gimme Shelter" to Merry Clayton--"Love,
sister, it's just a kiss away, it's just a kiss away"--I touched her
for the first time. There were contradictions there--did I love her
just because I wanted to kiss her?--and contradictions within
contradictions--did Mick really mean that?--but I ignored them as
always. The Rolling Stones epitomized the thing I loved most in the
world, rock and roll, and they could induce me to ignore anything. I
played their records all the time.

The phone call from California changed that. In the year or so after
Altamont--the end of 1969, all of 1970, and into 1971--I almost
stopped listening to the Stones, and whenever I did, the
contradictions welled up in me. Admittedly, my reaction was uncommonly
intense, and most of those who shared it had always dug the Stones as
symbols, not as a rock and roll group. Their response to Altamont was
comparably abstract.As Mick Jagger told an interviewer recently: "Of
course some people wanted to say Altamont was the end of an
era. People like that are fashion writers. Perhaps it was the end of
their era, the end of their na´vetÚ. I would have thought it
ended long before Altamont." Yet one must suspect an artist as subtle
as Jagger of being disingenuous here, as if he were ever anything
else. Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of
an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an
era ended.

Time: the final month of the decade that spawned that unprecedented
and probably insupportable contradiction in terms, mass bohemia,
popularly known as the counterculture. Occasion: On America's ultimate
frontier some three hundred thousand bohemians come together with
their chosen images, five formerly lower- to middle-class Englishmen
who fuse Afro-American music with European sensibility. Denouement: An
Afro-American bohemian is murdered by a lower-class white Hell's Angel
while the Englishmen do a song called "Sympathy for the Devil."

As civil war this sequence may have been small potatoes--the dope
snuffs in the interstices of San Francisco's black Fillmore district
and hippie Haight were a lot worse--but as a work of art it was
exquisite, the culmination of the Stones oeuvre, not to mention a
great movie script. Keith Richard, the stud to Jagger's sybarite,
acknowledged its aptness in his own rough way: "Altamont, it could
only happen to the Stones, man. Let's face it. It wouldn't happen to
the Bee Gees and it wouldn't happen to Crosby, Stills and Nash."

Richard may be rough, but his use of the passive "to the
Stones" is also a trifle disingenuous. After a century of
psychotherapeutic speculation we ought to understand that if something
can happen only to you, you are probably helping it along. Not that
the evasion matters. If it is typical of the Stones' genius that their
responsibility is difficult to pinpoint, it is typical of their burden
that everyone who's into blame blames them anyway. After all, Altamont
was as much the Grateful Dead's show as it was the Stones'. The Stones
consulted with the Dead when the event was conceived, and recognizing
that a free concert in California was Dead turf, scheduled them to
perform last, although in the end the Dead fell back before the bad
vibes. The Angels were--and still are--the Dead's friends, and the
Stones' Altamont coordinator, Sam Cutler, went to work for the Dead
when it was all over. Yet no one ever accused the Dead of laying their
star-tripping bummer on Woodstock Nation West--least of all
me. Ignoring the contradictions once again, I instead found myself
transformed into a Grateful Dead freak.

I ignored the contradictions, but I was quite aware of them. Even as I
stomped out the key lines of "St. Stephen"--"Talk about your plenty,
talk about your ills/ One man gathers what another man spills"--I
recognized how smoothly the Dead Americanized volatile intellectual
imports like karma and eternal recurrence. Only within a culture as
benign and abundant as that of Northern California could anything real
and humane accompany such vast cosmic notions, but it did, and the
Dead were its highest manifestation. They were not uncomplicated men,
but within the controlled environment of the concert hall they
generated a joyful noise that went beyond complications, and I was
happy to sing along with Jerry Garcia on "New Speedway Boogie":
"Things went down we don't understand/ But I think in time we will."

The catch was that I already understood--understood that giving the
Angels police power at the hub of that sprawl was a criminally na´ve
extension of the American karmic principle, popularly known as
do-your-own-thing. But I also understood that if the Dead were na´ve,
then Mick Jagger--who accuses others of na´vetÚ, remember--was
probably something nastier. I would call it criminally ironic. Jerry
Garcia's serenity is religious, and smug; Jagger's detachment is
aesthetic, and jaded. Like most Stones fans, I felt more in common
with Jagger, so after Altamont I got it on with Garcia. He was from
another sphere--I felt no responsibility for his errors. Jagger had
been doing my dirty work for years.

The phrase "dirty work" is fortuitous--suggesting working class, baby
work out, down and dirty, dirty-minded--but too pejorative at the
outset, for above all, the Stones were and are the greatest rock and
rollers ever. For pure rock and roll the only conceivable competition
comes from Chuck Berry--not Elvis or Little Richard, not the Beatles
or Creedence of the Dead. The Stones' devotion to rock and roll turned
us on and brought us through. If the Dead soared beyond their own
complications, then the Stones rolled right over the
contradictions. They always gave us a rocking good time, and they had
a good time themselves while they did.

But the contradictions were there. Good times were always at the heart
of rock and roll, absolutely, but the good times had to be won, like
anything else. What has made the Rolling Stones so special is their
understanding of how long and paradoxical the struggle for really good
times must be. Unlike the American folkies--their more privileged and
romantic analogue--the Stones were always antiutopian. They never
idealized, and they never expected to be pure as a consequence, they
were never put off by the commerciality of rock and roll. In fact,
having been released from some of the dreary stiffness of the English
class system by the tough, joyous physicality of their Afro-American
music, they were if anything eager for whatever material benefits
might accrue, though they certainly weren't counting on them.

Most of this the Stones shared with the Beatles. Because both groups
perceived American affluence and music from a distance, they
understood how very vital it was, and even more important, both were
wise enough to intuit that their distance from the Afro-American
source would be a necessary and authentic part of whatever they did
with it. In order to be itself, English rock and roll had to stand
outside itself. For the Beatles this insight was anything but
ominous. Basically optimistic and rooted in American pop, they
manifested their sense of distance in silliness, fun, play. But the
Stones came from a darker, angrier place.

Anyway, Mick did. Although he first found it hard to choose between
rock and roll and the London School of Economics, it would be a
mistake to all him an intellectual--just like Bob Dylan, he doesn't
permit it. But even if he never thought of it in such terms, the way
Mick acted out his distance from the music he loved was a measure of
his alienation, both from himself and from his native culture. Of the
others, only Brian Jones matched Mick's occasional desperation. Keith
was your basic straight-ahead rocker, and Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts
were typical musicians right down to their fondness for jazz.

But all the Stones were rebels, by commitment as well as by
necessity. They flaunted their clothes and hair, their collective
sneer, and their music itself. It is often observed that the
black-oriented rhythm-and-blues they preferred was more openly sexual
than the Beatles' pop rock and roll, but what really set it apart was
the project of self-definition it implied. Like so many bohemian
rebels, the Stones sought correlatives for their own uniqueness that
no one else had found first. They liked not only rhythm-and-blues but
obscure rhythm-and-blues, and if the Beatles rebelled into sexuality,
the Stones conceived sexuality as a means to a larger rebellion.

Early analyses of their music veered between two poles--Jagger was
either a great blues singer or a soulless thief--and both were
wrong. Like so many extraordinary voices, Jagger's defied description
by contradicting itself. It was liquescent and nasal, full-throated
and whiny. But it was not what Tom Wolfe once called it, "the voice of
a bull Negro," nor did it aspire to be. It was simply the voice of a
white boy who loved the way black men sang--Jagger used to name Wilson
Pickett as his favorite vocalist--but who had come to terms with not
being black himself. Of course, Jagger picked up a defense mannerism
along the way: He always sang with a curl of his lubricious upper
lip. His style was an audacious revelation. It was not weaker than
black singing, just different, and the difference always involved
directness of feeling. Jagger didn't so much sing Muddy Waters' "I
Just Want to Make Love to You" as get it over with, and although he
really seemed to wish us "Good Times," he made the prospect sound
doubtful where Sam Cooke enjoyed the wish itself.

But even as Jagger equivocated around the usages of black singing, and
around the lyrics themselves, he rocked. Even when the Stones were as
crude and out-of-tune as their detractors claimed, they made us shake
our moneymakers. Their insistence on beat and volume was so aggressive
and single-minded that they drove off the tender-minded altogether,
which was the whole idea. Whatever nuance we thought we pinned down in
Jagger's singing--lust or tease, self-confidence or self-mockery--he
would most certainly baffle us one convolution later. Only the hard
physical reality of the music was certain.

For those who heard them this way--and we were no more explicit about
it than they were--the Stones were fab faves indeed, but just how many
of us there were was unclear. For the first year and a half of
Beatlemania the Stones were the number-two English group only in
publicity--their sales lagged behind the Dave Clark Five's and
Herman's Hermits' and barely stayed ahead of the Kinks' and the
Animals'. Then came "Satisfaction." It was the perfect Stones
paradox--the lyrics denied what the music delivered--and it dominated
the summer of 1965. Driving home from rainy retreats, vacationing
parents and their children shouted out "I can't get no" in unison while
older brothers and sisters decided that the middle verse was about a
girl who won't put out because it's her period. A whole country was
brought together, sort of, by Mick and Keith's anthem of frustration.

Suddenly, the Stones rebellious project of radical self-definition was
becoming a mass movement--against everything that kept the world
within our reach and out of our grasp, everything that stopped us from
making felt possibilities real. Mick and Keith now wrote most of the
material. They voiced the enthusiastic hostility of the new mass
bohemianism more directly than the rhythm-and-blues artists, who
usually muted their hostility because they were too busy just
surviving to pursue hopeless battles. The Stones and their
constituency were sure enough of their own survival to covet something
better, but the Stones, at least, were much too realistic to expect to
achieve it. Their anger was almost part of a vicious cycle.

In the end, in fact, their anger was directed not at the cruelties of
politics and economics so much as at a metaphysical joke. The Stones
wanted what they couldn't have and felt detached even from their own
desire. Mick accepted his inability to sing from as deep in his heart
as Wilson Pickett, he even reveled in it, but he wasn't sure he liked
it, not deep in his heart. Having found the courage and insight to
define his whiteness in relation to black people, he still resented
having to do so, because at one of his many levels he was pure
libido--he wanted everything, and he was arrogant enough to believe he
deserved it. Black or white was no fairer a choice than good or evil.

The Stones' attitude toward women was especially ambiguous. Their
realism stemmed from the tough antiromanticism of rhythm-and-blues,
which asserted that sex was good in itself (I'm a king bee, buzzin'
'round your hive, and I just want to make love to you) and connected
to love (we got a good thing goin'), and that love involved pain that
was deeper and more complex than pop heartbreak. But almost as soon as
Jagger and Richard began to compose, they created a persona whose
hostility to women rose above and beyond the call of realism. The
protagonist of "Heart of Stone" wasn't just a little red rooster
strutting his stuff or a heart-pained lover for whom blue had turned
to gray, and he wasn't just tough, either. He was hard, bearing the
same relationship to the blues stud that the metallic incursions of
the Stones' music did to real rhythm-and-blues. It's almost as if
women in all their contradictory humanity symbolized the conditions of
life which were the ultimate target of the Stones' anger. Or maybe it
worked the other way around.

In any case, it built from there. By the time of the Stones'
ascendancy-in-exile--the three-year period following their 1966 tour
when they were banned from this country due to drug arrests--the
heart-of-stone man who kept stupid girls under his thumb and then
discarded them like yesterday's papers seemed to have become Mick's
basic character. Actually, the Stones celebrated their share of
heroines--some as autonomous as the elusive (hence imaginary?) Ruby
Tuesday--and Mick's more likable rhythm-and-blues stud got his share
of the action, including classic songs like "Goin' Home" and "Let's
Spend the Night Together." Moreover, many of the anti-woman songs
could be construed as class revenge--Mick the real (albeit rich)
finally enabled to lay open the vacuity of his former economic
oppressors.

Yes, the beauty of the Stones was that they always left themselves an
out. There was no need to take their sexism literally. No matter how
Mick's characters seemed to exploit his stray cats and Siamese cats
and back-street girls and factory girls, chances were he wasn't any
more sincere or one-dimensional than usual. After all, Mick wasn't
even male in the usual sense. The most sexually exciting man in rock
had always been the most androgynous, deliberately counterposing his
almost girlish stage demeanor to Keith's droogy leer. In fact, all the
Stones had posed in drag on a forty-five jacket back in 1966. So even
when Mick performed "Midnight Rambler," that psychotic little
showpiece, it could be said that he was merely exposing the petty rape
fantasies of his male audience for what they were. Yet no matter what
music historians will say, that wasn't the way his male fans--not to
mention his female fans--could be expected to take it. Maybe this was
obtuseness, but it was also common sense. After all, the spate of
antiwoman songs that appeared between 1965 and 1967 can be passed off
as a devastating catalog of sexist stances, but Keith's explanation
ought to be kept in mind: "It was a spin-off from our environment
. . . hotels, and too many dumb chicks."

The 1969 tour was a triumphant exploration of the complexities of the
Stones' stance. All that irony and enigma was magnified into a
complete drama of good and evil, aspiration and frustration--a joyous,
bitter celebration of what could only be designated The Truth. With an
omega emblazoned on his black shirt and an Uncle Sam top hat, Jagger
took each of us as far as he or she wanted to go. Contradictions
within contradictions--Uncle Mick could always show you one more. The
triumphant sexist of "Under My Thumb" became the desolate supplicant
of "Love in Vain." The nasty triumph of "Midnight Rambler" turned into
the candid need of "Gimme Shelter." As for Altamont, it was simply the
final contradiction in a long series.

It was final because it went against the whole purport of the Stones'
drama. The truth was that the world was compounded of good and evil,
so that any undertaking as utopian as Altamont was doomed by
definition. If the Stones audience didn't understand it that way, it
was because the Stones themselves, in all their multileveled
contradiction, were unwilling to come out and tell them. They would
suggest it, yes, embody it, but they wouldn't make it plain, because
the nature of The Truth is that it isn't plain. If a fan wanted to
take Mick's struggle with male roles as an invitation to midnight
rambling, well, that was the nature of the game. Like any
bohemians--like any artists, perhaps--the Stones had always been
disinclined to relate to the mass of their followers. The Stones were
too arrogant, too idiosyncratic. Yet they had helped create a movement
around their own bohemianism, and that part of them that was pure
libido wanted not only to sweep regally through the alien land where
they had found their roots, divesting it of several million dollars,
but also to prove that they were part of all they had helped create. A
part of them wanted to be good guys.

They failed abjectly, at least in the short run, but it is na´ve and
dishonest for their former admirers to blame them unless they also
blame themselves. All of us who reveled in their irony, all of us who
pleasured ourselves in their art, all of us who pursued romantic
fantasies under their partial and contradictory pretenses, are just as
responsible. Until we acknowledge our own acquiescence in their
decisions, the Stones have a right to minimize their own
responsibilities as adamantly as they do.

For no matter how they minimize it, the experience has changed
them. Sticky Fingers, released in 1971 but recorded much
earlier, went even further in the direction of aesthetic image
exacerbation than had marked their 1969 tour. The single, "Brown
Sugar," was at once a brilliant exposure and blatant exploitation of
the racial and sexual contradictions of their stance, and "Moonlight
Mile" commented definitively on the relationship between sex, love,
and distance from self.

But the Stones who are touring the country right now are--almost--good
guys. They are less arrogant, less gleefully greedy, and more clearly
concerned that their tiny portion of utopia--concerts for their
still-expanding audience--be achieved as fairly and efficiently as
possible. Both live and on their new album, Exile on Main
Street, they are more into music and less into their own
image. Especially on record, Jagger has receded a little into the
background, and Mick Taylor, who was almost invisible as Brian Jones's
replacement on the 1969 tour, has come forward a little. Taylor is
younger and has roots in the new tradition of boogieing jam, so this
is a move toward the audience. It's not as if the Stones have
consented to join the movement they half-wittingly helped create, but
they seem ready to relate to it, and somehow that doesn't come off as
a cop-out. When such dedicated artists move honestly toward their
fans, you believe that love may be just a kiss away after all.